Mimi Lipson Tornado

mimi lipson Tornado n the morning of Saturday, June 15, 2013, my brother Sam Osent me a link to an AP wire service story. The headline said, “Rangers Rescue Hiker Hit by Fallen Tree in Smokies,” and the hiker was identified as “Nathan Lipsom.” They’d misspelled our last name, but it was close enough that someone Sam worked with had for- warded it to him, asking if this person was any relation. “Nathan Lipsom of Cambridge, Mass., was hiking on Low Gap Trail on Thursday when the storm hit around 4 p.m,” the story said. “A ranger discovered the injured hiker around 11:30 a.m. on Friday.” That was how my family learned that my brother Nate had been caught in a freak tornado. By the time we were reading about it, two days had passed. Sam called the ranger station mentioned in the article and got through to a Ranger St. Clair. Apparently, Nate had only been on the trail for a few hours when the weather turned. He was trapped in a gully with nowhere to shelter when the forest began bowing and twisting, and one of the big trees fell on him. He managed to drag himself out from under the tree and crawl several yards in the direc- tion of the trail. He pulled out his sleeping bag and lay awake all night with five crushed vertebrae and a broken shinbone sticking through the side of his foot, and that was where he was found eighteen hours later by a ranger who was checking the trail for damage. After several hours of trying to clear a path through the downed trees, the park rescue team called for a National Guard helicopter. Nate was strapped to a stretcher and lifted up through a hole in the dense forest canopy, the line swinging so wildly in the wind that his face smashed into the metal on the edge of the hatch door. The operation had taken from 11:30 Friday morning, when he was discovered, until 6:45 that evening. Ranger St. Clair told Sam that Nate had stopped by the ranger station on his way into the park and left my mother’s phone number in case of emergency, along with his planned route. Several times during the seven-hour rescue they asked for permission to call her, and each time he’d said no. 241 THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW We knew he’d planned an ambitious solo hike. Going into the woods was what he did when he was feeling overwhelmed by life. He had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder while in his twenties. That spring he’d been rattled by a disturbance in the building where he lived with our mother, and a manic episode had been gathering steam ever since. After many weeks of fitful preparation, he’d borrowed her Civic hatchback and driven from Cambridge down to Tennessee. According to the article, he’d been taken to Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. While Sam spoke with the ranger, I was on the phone with a hospital switchboard operator, who told me there was no Nathan Lipson (or Lipsom) in the patient registry. I asked if there was another hospital in town. “Sometimes,” the operator said, “a patient does not give permission to be listed in the registry. Even if he’s here. In the hospital.” I flew into Knoxville on Wednesday and took a hiker’s shuttle to the Cosby ranger station to retrieve my mother’s Honda. Ranger St. Clair was waiting for me with Nate’s pack and the car key, which he’d found in an outside pocket. He looked exactly like a park ranger: solid, bald, and kind, with a Smokey Bear patch on his short-sleeved shirt. He spread a map out on his desk, marking in ballpoint pen the place on Low Gap Trail where they’d found Nate, and then he showed me the conveyance with which they’d first tried to evacuate him: a sort of plastic toboggan, with wheelbarrow handles and a big front wheel. Imagining Nate bumping down the trail over stones and roots, I was grateful for all those fallen trees. The X-rays at the emergency room had revealed shards of bone in such dangerous proximity to his spinal cord that he’d been put into a medical coma to keep him from moving around. He’d been that close to becoming a paraplegic. When I got to Asheville, Nate was still unconscious. His face was obscured by a plastic splint; he’d broken some bones when he slammed into the helicopter. Bags dripped fluids into his body, and other fluids drained out into other bags. His injured foot was skewered like a ke- bab by long metal rods and suspended in the center of a jungle-gym contraption. My mother, who had been at the hospital for a few days already, was camped out in an armchair in Nate’s room. She whispered updates to me while nurses came and went, making notes on a whiteboard and checking his IV lines. In rooms up and down the hall, in adjoining ICU twilights, more families camped, surrounded by bewildering machines. 242 Mimi Lipson A room had been provided for us at Rathbun House, a short-term residence run by a hospital charity. This turned out to be a compound of newly constructed Victorian-style houses at the end of a long wooded lane, an uncanny valley of rocking-chair porches and mulched landscaping. There was a decorative wishing well and a gazebo made from pressure-treated lumber. Inside: a welcome desk, a kitchen, an electric kettle, a fridge full of takeout containers labeled with sharpies and masking tape. A great room with high cathedral windows. Couches, games, magazines, and everywhere, religious pamphlets. Our room had two twin beds and a rollaway cot. I lay awake for a while, absorbing the gravity of Nate’s condition as measured in Christian kindness. The next morning I saw that the lane we’d driven up in the dark was lined with some sort of flowering southern tree. At the hospital, Nate was still under sedation between surgeries. My mother returned to her chair, and, feeling useless, I decided to clean out her car. I drove out of the hospital lot, up and down the suburban parkways, until I spotted an unattended dumpster behind a motel. Anyone peering through the windshield would have guessed that a homeless person had been living in the Civic. In the few days it had taken Nate to get from Cambridge to Tennessee, he had crammed it with clothes, camping sup- plies, Styrofoam ramen cups, jars of cocktail peanuts, free road maps, shaving cream, Ace bandages — all of it pressed into geological strata demarked by thick sheaths of unused plastic Walmart bags that he must have surreptitiously grabbed at the register. As I pulled everything out onto the pavement, I saw that he’d bought and rebought the same items. I found three camping hatchets, the one in the bottommost layer still in its blister pack. Sorting through the midden, I felt like I was examining the contents of his disordered mind. I’m the youngest of four. I was born in Ithaca, New York, where my father taught Russian at Cornell. We moved to Cambridge a few years later, so I don’t remember Ithaca except in the unreliable way you remember scenes from a photo album, or events in family stories that have been told and retold. There’s a story about a family outing to Treman State Park, five miles outside of town. It was a popular swimming spot, with a natural rock pool at the base of a waterfall, outdoor grills, and picnic tables. On this occasion, Nate wandered off by himself up the gorge trail that climbed above the falls. He already loved the woods, so that wasn’t unusual. I 243 THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW imagine him kneeling in a patch of moss, peeling apart tissue-thin layers of mica, turning over logs in search of newts, studying the geometry of the sedimentary rock. When it was time to leave, my father walked up the trail calling for him, and he retreated farther into the trees. I see a flash of his striped T-shirt, visible from the path. “We’re leaving now,” my father yelled into the forest. “With or without you.” “Go ahead,” Nate yelled back. “I mean it.” “So do I.” My father indeed meant it. He packed everyone else up in the car and left. As I remember hearing the story, he returned to the house without Nate, and my mother drove off to look for him. She found him a mile or so from the park, stomping angrily along the break- down lane. I used to tell this story to show how Nate had been born Nate, willful and independent, and how untroubled my father was by conventional ideas about parenting. I told it as a funny story, but also with pride. Secretly, it was a story about my family’s specialness. “What do you think my father was like?” I asked a friend recently. “Just say the first thing that comes to mind.” My father died a long time ago, and I’ve sometimes wondered what impression my stories make on people who never met him. “Your father was Sergeant Bilko.” I remember watching Phil Silvers Show reruns on our black-and- white TV. It’s not a bad comparison. My father had Bilko’s charm, his fondness for a scam.

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